Developmental Evaluation

Organizations in the social sector are increasingly venturing into new ways to tackle the social, economic, and environmental challenges of our day. More nonprofits, foundations, and public agencies are especially looking to systems change and to social innovation as they develop their strategies. Developmental evaluation is gaining momentum as an evaluation approach designed to help cope with complexity, capture emergent learnings, and support actors to reflect on learnings and use them in service of ongoing strategy development.

LFA has put together this short Guide to outline some ways that its consultant teams approach this type of work. The Guide is not a toolkit or a recipe; instead it simply lays out LFA’s current thinking on how to design evaluations that have a significant developmental component. Download the Guide